


there is no emotion, there is peace

by purrfectj



Series: The Jedi Code [1]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Legends - All Media Types, Star Wars Legends: The Old Republic
Genre: Angst, Cheating, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, hints of sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-03
Updated: 2016-01-03
Packaged: 2018-05-11 07:51:13
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,758
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5619280
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/purrfectj/pseuds/purrfectj
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Keelyn has been married to a Jedi for a decade. They have been in actual, physical contact for a handful of months. If you counted all of them and strung them together it would be like an asteroid belt, loose, disconnected, with gaps wide enough to pilot a freighter through if one is careful and precise and a helluva pilot.</p>
            </blockquote>





	there is no emotion, there is peace

Keelyn has been married to a Jedi for a decade. They have been in actual, physical contact for a handful of months. If you counted all of them and strung them together it would be like an asteroid belt, loose, disconnected, with gaps wide enough to pilot a freighter through if one is careful and precise and a helluva pilot. 

She's a spacer, a nobody, an almost orphan whose parents died and left she and her sister to fend for themselves. Her sister is, maybe, dead, more likely beautiful and blonde and Imperial. Keelyn has no allegiance. She's a smuggler, mostly for herself, and her fluid morality is most likely one of the myriad reasons her marriage limps along, never quite taking. 

Corso is cute. He listens. He calls her Captain and not in a bored, sarcastic, or condescending voice. He doesn't ask, when she takes off her clothes, about her scars or the stretch marks or the reason she wears a plain silver band on a chain around her neck. He does ask, only once, about the holocall she gets twice monthly from some outer rim planet where a little boy with bright blue eyes and an engaging grin waves enthusiastically and reminds her so much of her husband that her stomach aches. Her answer is that they all have secrets and this is hers. 

She wonders how the man who married her in a rush of lust and pain on a desert planet separates the man who sometimes find himself in her bed from the man who believes in the Jedi Code of duty, honor, sacrifice. From the man who touches her skin without tenderness, without guilt, without shame, who always leaves. 

They always leave, in the end. Corso will, too, she supposes. He's too kind, not quite accustomed, despite everything, to the hazy way she views her privateer status. When he says her idea of fun is interesting, she hears another voice telling her gently that he's made promises he has to keep. 

Never to her, though. Never to the smuggler who learned her medical techniques while she was running guns against a Republic blockade and took a blaster bolt to the side. To the woman who got pregnant on accident when there was a mix-up with the implant she could barely afford, who kept flying her ship until her belly was pushing obscenely against her flight suit, who gave birth alone save the kind, gentle Jedi who came when she called. The kind, gentle Sage who took her son when he was barely ten hours old because there are rules and she's broken all of them, every one, and she thought it was only fair she protect him from this one when he's protected her with his name if not his presence for longer than anyone ever has before. 

Sitting here on the bridge of her ship, looking out over Balmorra, she hears the chirp that means an incoming holocall. Corso is asleep in quarters but she's been restless all night, playing Dejarik for a little while with Risha until even the deposed crime princess abandoned her, and now she presses the button with the kind of blind fatalism that has defined her life. 

“Keelyn.” He looks older even on the holo, new lines around his eyes which she knows are as blue as the sky over Ord Mantell, a slight wrinkling of his brows the only indication he is bothered by how she's kicked her bare feet up on her control console, how she's wearing a skimpy sleep tank and skin-tight leggings that are fraying at the edges, her flight jacket not actually worn but hanging perfectly to frame her generous breasts. 

It always did bother him that he found her body aesthetically pleasing. The fuck of it is, she finds him just as pleasing: the long, sharply boned face with its jutting chin, the high, slanted cheekbones, the patrician nose, the longest lashes on any man she's ever seen, curling and dark as engine oil, the perfect proportions of his tall, lean body, built like the Guardian he is, wide shoulders, narrow hips, scars and muscles and that damnable lightsaber. Her body aches and the inconvenience, the _gall,_ when she had Corso between her legs only hours ago, makes her insolent. 

“Jedi,” she says snidely and watches as he pinches the bridge of his nose. “What can this Republic privateer do for you?” 

“I heard you were officially sanctioned now. Congratulations.” He means it, sincerely, and would probably even be proud of her for going straight if he was allowed such an emotion. 

She toasts him with the slim drink tube in her hand, her voice carefully bland. “Thanks. At least the money I make is mostly clean now.” 

His sigh is long and deep, his stance relaxing just a little from the rigid pose he's holding, his hands clasped before him, his legs slightly spread, the calm, patient Jedi facing the secret, unruly wife he abandoned before they were married more than a week. There's so much kindness in his face, so much she remembers about the quick, hard couplings, the loud, angry shouting, the whispers and the pain and the uneasy line he drew between being a man and being a paragon. She thinks she hates him, just a little, but not enough. Never enough. “I need a favor.” 

This is new and almost has her sitting forward in surprise and eagerness. Instead, she takes a long, careful sip of the liquor in her cup, letting its burn ease the starburst in her stomach, and strives for a neutral expression. “Ask away.” 

“Ranissa has gone...missing.” 

“Oh.” It's a quick pop of sound, a sharp exhale she can't take back and she sees it register with him, sees his expression harden, briefly, before smoothing out. He doesn't know, still, why she hates that name, thinks it petty jealousy or women's business or some other bit of her non-Force nonsense. 

He's never seen their son, their son who is seven, who was spirited away by Ranissa because they both, his Padawan and his wife, wanted to protect the man they love. But there is no love lost between the women, the one his equal, the other just proof that he has feet of clay. Ranissa's love for her mentor is pure and soft and sweet. Keelyn's love for him is darker, richer, destructive. She feels its pull now head and heart and belly as he waits, patiently, for her to ask, to demand, to plead or beg or deny. 

“My rates have gone up significantly since the last time,” she says and has the satisfaction of seeing his thin mouth compress sharply. She would lay odds that the Force just shuddered around him, that he just had to shove more rage into the box labeled _wife_. 

“You will of course be compensated for your time.” 

“So prissy.” There's no rancor in her words, though, as she pushes her arms into the sleeves of her jacket and sits up, as she pulls her holopad closer and types out some terms. She sends it to him on his private frequency and her eyebrows twitch when he doesn't even bother to look at them. 

“As I said, you'll be compensated. Whatever you need.” 

For some reason, a cold chill slithers down her spine and Keelyn asks because she can, he's given her permission by seeking her help, “Where was she?” but she already knows the answer, already knows what he's going to say and when he names the planet where they've stashed the Force-sensitive little boy with her nose and his mouth, the sound she makes has him leaning forward, his eyes sharp even on the holo. 

“What?” he demands and there is no serenity in his voice, no calm, no Jedi, only the man who took her the first time after a firefight, shoving her roughly up against a wall, his teeth at her throat, the Force used in ways she suspects are against every code everywhere as he didn't even bother to undress, just his long, thick cock out of his robes, her pants and smalls around her ankles, inside of her before she was even sure she was ready. 

She scrubs a hand over her face and asks, quietly, only a supreme effort of will keeping her voice from wavering like her heart, “Was anyone else taken?” 

He frowns and shakes his head. “No. No one else in the training facility seems to be missing. All of the younglings are accounted for.” 

Ah. So even the great Ranissa is breaking rules because children training to be Jedi have no family but still the holocalls every other week, still the allowance to call her 'mama', to let him spend the one week a year he spends with her on the ship, learning to use the tools and the tricks of his mother's trade as he is, apparently, learning the tools and tricks of his father's. The question is out before she can stop it. “Have you been there?” At his questioning look, she almost calls it back, this secret she's kept for far too long, but he could riffle around in her head if he wanted though he won't, too thoughtful and respectful except when he's inside of her and he can put their pleasure on an endless feedback loop, explosions waging war behind her eyes. “To the facility.” 

The pause is long between them, fraught and dangerous, and then he exhales, long and slow, and his eyes soften and he reaches out and she can almost feel the warmth of his big palm on her cheek, his breath stirring the hair at her temple. “Atlan is safe.” 

Corso wakes the next morning to his Captain, his lover and his friend and his beautiful lady, sitting on the edge of their bed, the silver ring she has worn as long as he's been her co-pilot lying in the palm of her hand, her green eyes as cold as the desert at night. He sits up, slowly, and lays a tentative hand on her shoulder. He is surprised by the way she grips that hand, the way she drops her head to his shoulder and sobs after she heaves the ring and its chain across the room. He doesn't ask her to explain, doesn't offer useless platitudes or sympathy. He lays back into the tangle of blankets and lets her cry out her rage and her grief and her regret into his skin. 


End file.
